Man jailed for downloading 104,523 child porn images

A WEST Wales man who built up one of the biggest and most depraved child pornography collections ever seen in British courts was jailed for four years today.

And Carmarthen Crown Court heard 26-year-old Aled Matthews, whose fiancee knew nothing about his twisted desires, boasted to paedophiles on internet chat rooms that he ‘could not wait to have kids’ so he could start abusing them.

And he also claimed on the internet he intended to ‘turn’ his fiancee who, he said, worked with children from ‘the age of zero upwards’.

Matthews, who lived with his innocent fiancee at Heol Morlais, Ammanford, downloaded 104,523 child pornography images onto his computer and stored them on memory sticks and CDs.

They showed children ‘from the age of one upwards’ being sexually abused by adults.

The images were so sickening, experienced Dyfed Powys Police computer crime investigator Sandra Kealey, who had spent years examining child pornography images as part of her job, said she was moved to tears for the first time in her career.

Sentencing Matthews yesterday, judge Michael Burr said : ‘The people who made these images descended to the pit.’

And he told Matthews : ‘You fell into the trap of accessing them on the internet and to your discredit found you had some interest in them.’

Matthews pleaded guilty to 33 sample charges relating to the 104,523 images, 16 of making (downloading) indecent images, 16 of distributing them and one of possessing them.

As well as being jailed for four years yesterday he was also placed on the sex offenders’ register ‘indefinitely’, banned from using computers or other technology capable of holding images and was also ordered to stay away from children under 16 unless they were accompanied by a responsible adult.

He was also disqualified from ever working with children.

Matthews built up what Judge Burr called the ‘vast’ child pornography collection within three months of buying a computer in Swansea.

He began swapping indecent images, which included video footage as well as still pictures, over the internet and it was this which alerted the police.

A labourer with a steady job at a West Wales building firm, Matthews had no previous convictions so it came as a huge shock to his family when he was arrested in May of last year.

His barrister Huw Davies said Matthews asked for voluntary redundancy knowing ‘the game was up’.

The 26-year-old, whose parents watched him being jailed from the public gallery yesterday, told detectives he became bored with adult pornography on the internet and began searching for child related pornography.

Many of the images in his collection contained the most serious ‘category five’ images which include children being sexually and physically abused.

Police interviewed Matthews’s fiancee but, the court heard, it was clear she knew nothing about his criminal activities.

Carina Hughes, prosecuting, said the amount of indecent images in the case was one of the biggest to come before the courts and the abuse depicted was also among the worse.

Police found files on Matthews’s computer which logged his chat room entries.

In one conversation he told another internet user he and his fiancee were ‘trying for kids next year’.

He then says ‘can’t wait’ and places a smiling face icon next to it and later says, ‘am trying to turn the girlfriend onto it, she’s not into it’.

He also said that she worked with children from the age of zero upwards and he hoped that he could ‘have some fun’.

Matthews told police that he made these statements out of ‘bravado’ and in an attempt to attract other like minded people on the internet to talk to him.

He said he had no intention of carrying out any of the suggestions he made in chat rooms.

The defendant’s barrister Huw Rees said his client accepted the harm that the production of the images did to children though he emphasised Matthews merely watched the images and was not involved in making them.

He also said Matthews made no money from distributing the images to others on the internet.”